Joseph Badtke-Berkow - The Japan Times

December 25, 2024

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Joseph Badtke-Berkow

CULTURE / Film

Jul 20, 2007

Tokyo hosts world's top refugee film fest

The United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR) counts about 33 million refugees in the world today. There is an even larger multitude saddled with the chillingly bureaucratic title "internally displaced persons."

Japan Times

CULTURE / Music

Jun 21, 2007

Soundtrack of the summer: Bi Kidude

The rich cultural history of Africa's spice islands comes to life in the gravelly, deep-throated singing of Bi Kidude. Now in her 90s (her exact age is unknown), Kidude is considered the embodiment of Zanzibari Tarab singing, a genre drawing on African, Middle Eastern and Indian sources with distinct...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Music

Apr 6, 2007

Multicultural psychosis

Eugene Hutz is a difficult man to pin down. He is rarely in the same country, let alone the same city, for more than a few weeks at a time, touring with his band Gogol Bordello across time-zones and cultures on four different continents for most of the year.

Japan Times

LIFE / Travel

Mar 30, 2007

Up, up and away

For the length of the Occupation of Japan, from defeat in 1945 to the return of sovereignty in 1952, the skies belonged to the Allies.

Japan Times

LIFE / Travel

Mar 9, 2007

A place apart from you

Where are the wildernesses of lore?

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Nov 16, 2006

An upheaval of creativity

History is full of lies but, there's at least one truth you can count on: times of great upheaval and change often lead to, and are on occasion born of, great flowerings of human genius.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Oct 19, 2006

Shomei Tomatsu retrospective traces post-war experience

At age 15 in 1945, Shomei Tomatsu was working at an aircraft assembly plant in Nagoya. U.S. B-29s were bombing the industrial city so relentlessly that by the end of World War II, nine out of 10 of its buildings were destroyed -- compared with five out of 10 in Tokyo.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Oct 12, 2006

Fumio Nanjo's vision comes to the fore

The departure of director David Elliott from the Mori Art Museum to take over the Istanbul Modern in Turkey is the first major leadership change at Japan's largest privately endowed cultural institution. Though it was not without controversy, Elliott's tenure saw the 3-year-old museum develop into what...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Oct 5, 2006

Departing director created a new platform for contemporary art in Tokyo

It would have been difficult to find a more dramatic backdrop for last week's press conference announcing that Mori Art Museum's British-born director David Elliott will be leaving after October, and that his second-in-command, Fumio Nanjo, will take over the helm of Japan's largest privately endowed...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Sep 28, 2006

Fumio Nanjo to replace David Elliott

The Mori Art Museum's director, David Elliott, will leave his post at the end of October to take a position as the new director of the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art in Turkey. The news was announced Wednesday at a press conference at Roppongi Hills, where Elliott spoke of his five years in Tokyo working...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Music

Sep 28, 2006

Celebrating civilizations

The Islamic world is home to one of the richest and most important musical traditions on Earth. It doesn't hurt that it also spans an incredibly vast area, stretching west to Morocco and east as far as Indonesia, and that it contains an intricate tapestry of races, languages and cultures, or that it...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Music

Sep 22, 2006

Following the father

You've probably heard of the father of Afrobeat bandmaster and award-winning musician Femi Kuti. And if by chance you haven't, you're missing out on one of Africa's greatest musical legends.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Sep 14, 2006

Allegations of plagiarism raised by kaleidoscope installation in Echigo-Tsumari

Picasso once said, "good artists copy, great artists steal." Of course, it has never been as simple as that. Questions concerning artistic authenticity, honest or dishonest intentions and outright plagiarism have been around ever since societies began to consider artistic expression the unique product...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Aug 10, 2006

There's an art to saving country life

Just a few hours north of Tokyo's seemingly endless sprawl is the mountainous region of Echigo-Tsumari in Niigata Prefecture. Like so many other rural parts of northern Japan, it is a rugged, isolated, aging and economically stagnant place where elderly men and women can be found doubled over in terraced...

CULTURE / Music

Jul 20, 2006

Senegal is calling

Time and again Western journalists ask superstar Senegalese pop singer Youssou N'Dour, arguably the most successful African musician in history, the same question: Why, despite selling hundreds of thousands of records in the West and collaborating with artists such as Peter Gabriel, Sting, Wyclef Jean...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Jun 1, 2006

"Off the Record "

Bottom floor of Shibuya's Sega Gigo game center Runs indefinitely

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

May 25, 2006

Everyone has an idea about "Africa." Pestilence, famine and genocide top many people's lists. Others think of boundless natural wonder and sprawling metropolises bursting with life. But the truth of it is, there is no one "Africa." There are only Africans, and they defy generalization.

One of the many entrances to the Kabukicho neighborhood in Tokyo’s Shinjuku Ward.

Kabukicho: Tokyo’s ‘stadium of desire’

Visitors to Kyoto walk along a street near Kiyomizu Temple in April. A popular tourist spot, Kyoto has seen what locals feel to be an overwhelming amount of tourists in 2024.

Is Japan ready for 60 million tourists?

By Kathryn Wortley

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